Towards an understanding of Type Ia supernovae from a synthesis of theory and observations

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent observational data and advanced 3D hydrodynamic models of Type Ia supernovae, aiming to enhance understanding of their explosion mechanisms and improve their reliability as cosmological distance indicators.

Contribution

It presents new predictive models of SNe Ia that match observations without adjustable parameters, advancing the theoretical understanding of their diversity and explosion physics.

Findings

Models have strong predictive power for light curves and spectra.

Comparison with observations supports the models' validity.

Models help explore the diversity of SNe Ia phenomena.

Abstract

Motivated by the fact that calibrated light curves of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) have become a major tool to determine the expansion history of the Universe, considerable attention has been given to, both, observations and models of these events over the past 15 years. Here, we summarize new observational constraints, address recent progress in modeling Type Ia supernovae by means of three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations, and discuss several of the still open questions. It will be be shown that the new models have considerable predictive power which allows us to study observable properties such as light curves and spectra without adjustable non-physical parameters. This is a necessary requisite to improve our understanding of the explosion mechanism and to settle the question of the applicability of SNe Ia as distance indicators for cosmology. We explore the capabilities of the models by comparing them with observations and we show how such models can be applied to study the origin of the diversity of SNe Ia.